An Out-of-Family Child (OFC) is a minor without a stable family relationship who is experiencing a situation of ‘welfare’ which, if prolonged, will have the same consequences as abandonment. Obviously, it is not a juridical abandonment, but abandonment nonetheless.

According to the European Commission, social exclusion is ‘a process whereby some individuals are put at the margins of society and excluded from full participation in it due to poverty, lack of basic skills and the opportunity of permanent training or discrimination. The exclusion process takes individuals away from employment opportunities, income and educational opportunities, as well as from networks and social and community activities. With this poor access to authorities and decision-making institutions, they often feel helpless and unable to participate in decisions concerning their daily life” (European Commission, 2003).

An OFC is a minor to whom is denied the right to have a family and thus, a person who is exposed to a high risk of social exclusion. His condition has several consequences:

1. Social consequences

·               Reproducibility of negative models in his/her future life

·               High risk of social drifting (prostitution and micro-criminality)

·               Marginalisation

1. Economic consequences

·               High care costs at residential facilities

·               High recovery and reintegration costs in society

·               High costs in services management

Despite all efforts to guarantee them adequate living conditions, minors in public institutes or in communities receive only public assistance, including accommodation, means of subsistence and health care. What the community does not create is the chance to have and develop a personal relationship in terms of affection and emotion, which is free and costless, and that can be found only in a family. It is a fundamental aspect of the growth and development process of a child, which has a significant impact on his character, his socio-relational attitude towards other people and on his own serenity and sociability.

How long is it legitimate to deprive a child of this aspect, and of the chance of creating filial relationships? Isn’t this form of loss a form of psychological-emotional abuse on the child’s life?

The family relationship regards the aspect of unicity and singleness of the human being, which is the basis of the filial status. The value of this relationship, in a community environment cannot be guaranteed at all due both to contingent reasons (minors-educators ratio, permanence and operators turnover) and to deontological reasons linked to the service (the educator cannot feel himself overwhelmed by a personal affective-emotional transport for the child).

Due to these reasons, “the community structure cannot offer reference individuals stable enough to ensure the child gets the chance to process his or her own strategy of real affection. This is due to the very nature of the service it has to provide, i.e. to take care of and educate the child waiting for final placement in a family (better if the own one). The work with the minor in the community is first of all aimed at taking care of his primary needs, which regard his biological and psychomotor development; while satisfactory work on the dimension of the affective-relationship development remains excluded or in any case given little consideration”.[1]

The problem of inter-familiar hospitality as psychological abandonment

The suspension condition of the filial relationship and of the family care dimension, with all its emotional-affective significance, seems comparable with that identified by G. M. Riva as a way of psychological abandonment called “inter-familiar hospitality”.[2]

It indicates “a type of white relationship with the mother or caregiver, i.e. the incapacity of the mother to commit herself and to let herself become involved in a relationship with her child, a kind of emotional desert. She is not affectively available, able to create an affective syntony with him. It is rather the child, who must gradually syntonize himself with the problems of the mother or caregiver.[3]

The word “hospitality” refers exactly to the condition of an abandoned child, who does not feel he belongs to a family, but, rather, is an outsider, a guest, a scapegoat. And it is this very same sad and frustrating awareness of belonging to nobody (to be a nobody’s child) that causes psychic pathologies.

A minor living in a residential structure (irrespective of the dimensions and quality of the welfare services) is a minor who learns to adapt himself continuously to different communication and relationship styles with the operators, in order to handle the absence of his own primary affection figure.

“These situations characterize blurred atmospheres and climates, typical of the so called cumulative traumas, where there is not just one traumatic episode, but rather persuasive behaviors and attitudes which are constantly negative and rejecting are presented to the child. Thus, the child is always traumatized and cannot feel his spontaneous and natural needs, as this is too painful and dangerous for him. The price to be paid for feeling his own needs is represented by the need to face the terrible environmental delusion in their respect. Therefore, the child is completely lost and no longer in touch with himself and is psychologically everybody’s orphan. Isolation and loneliness force the child to remain alone without resources, with his own nightmares and anxieties, generating a real internal disaster giving way to internal struggles among his own ghosts, fears, questions without any answers and the sense of inscrutability which arises and permeates life.”[4]

[3] M. G. Riva, ibidem, page 132.